Sometimes, I run across an article which piques my interest, like the story of Annie Kane, the poor Cochise County girl who developed schizophrenia, and finally ended her own life in Tombstone, or Madam Irene Logan, who was shot to death by Madam Dora Garnett in the the latter's saloon in Brewery Gulch in Bisbee. They are good stories, which should be told, but they are too short to be books, and too long in the telling to be articles. The manuscript I recently submitted to M

The last couple weeks of December were kind of hectic, and it continues. I was working on preparing my manuscript about homicides in the Arizona Territory for submission to McFarland & Co. - editing, collecting photos, getting permissions, etc. I wanted to turn it in on December 31st. I was wrapping it up pretty well, when McFarland sent me the page proofs for The Red Lights Districts of Tucson, 1870 - 1918 with instructions to edit the pages and have an index made. I was giv

One of the issues in publishing through a small publishing house, like McFarland & Co, is it is up to me to procure the illustrations and photographs to accompany the manuscript, and pay for them. It is wild how much the prices vary from archive to archive. By way of example, I was looking for a photograph of William Zeckendorf, a Tucson merchant who was instrumental in the capture and the justice meted out to the murderers of Vincente “Jose” Hernandez, a.k.a. Piedras Negras

I was writing articles about Gila County history for the Payson Roundup awhile back, but they decided to go with more local histories. Well, I guess they ran out of good stories about Payson. Nothing really ever happened here during the territorial era. The history of Payson is just a bunch of ranchers watching their cattle and an occasional prospector looking for traces of gold (which they rarely found). It is a history which is really only of interest to the descendants of